Cops vs Free SpeechHow police are threatening Mumia, convicts, teachers, and all of us with censorship as well as bullets!

• The
New “gag” law in Pennsylvania that seeks to silence prisoners. This law,
cobbled together in days following Mumia’s recorded presentation to a
commencement ceremony at Goddard College, was explicitly designed to
“shut him up.” The targets of this blatantly unconstitutional law,
however, include all prisoners convicted of violent crimes!

• A
Law Suit has been filed to stop the “gag” law from being implemented!
Support for this effort is critical. Donations will go toward the fight
against the “gag” law.

• The suppression of the “Urban Dreams”
web site by the Oakland School Board. This teacher-created site of
voluntary curriculum ideas included one comparing the suppression of
Mumia’s commentaries with censorship of Martin Luther King’s later
writings. While the Superintendent of Schools has now promised to
restore the site, we must remain vigilant!

• Both of these
measures—the “gag” law in Pennsylvania, and the suppression of the Urban
Dreams website—were taken at the behest of the Fraternal Order of
Police (FOP)! The FOP is a highly politicized organization which seeks
to silence social critics such as Mumia Abu-Jamal, and dictate the
curricula in schools! The FOP and Democrat/Republican politicians will
continue their attempts at intimidation and suppression, unless we act!

•
Ferguson shows that black and Latino youth particularly are threatened
by militarized and politicized police who shoot first and ask questions
later, and frame their targets for crimes they didn’t commit. Chief
targets have included Native American Activists like Leonard Peltier,
militant working-class activists, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Black Panthers and
Martin Luther King. Mumia is currently a top target to silence. But
anyone and everyone can be on their enemies list, and in their
cross-hairs! Fight back now!

Donate Now
to fight the “gag” law!
go to:
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/protect-freedom-of-speech-keep-mumia-on-the-air

$50 will get you a beautiful tote bag (you can special order a yoga mat bag, just call us).

$100 will get the DVD "Mumia: Long Distance Revolutionary"

$300 will bring one essay to the airwaves.

$1000 (or $88.83 per month) will make you a member of our Prison Radio Freedom Circle. Take a moment and Support Prison Radio

Luchando por la justicia y la libertad,

Noelle Hanrahan, Director, Prison Radio

PRISON RADIO

P.O. Box 411074 San Francisco, CA 94141

www.prisonradio.org
info@prisonradio.org 415-706-5222

Pennsylvania
legislators are trying to stop prisoners from speaking about their
ideas and experiences. Last week, PA Representative Mike Vereb
introduced a bill (HB2533) called the “Revictimization Relief Act,”
which would allow victims, District Attorneys, and the Attorney General
to sue people who have been convicted of “personal injury” crimes for
speaking out publicly if it causes the victim of the crime “mental
anguish.”

The bill was written in response to political
prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal’s commencement speech at Goddard College, and
is a clear attempt to silence Mumia and other prisoners and formerly
incarcerated people. We believe that this legislation is not actually an
attempt to help victims, but a cynical move by legislators to stop
people in prison from speaking out against an unjust system.

While
to us this seems like a clear violation of the first amendment,
unfortunately the PA General Assembly doesn’t appear to agree, and they
have fast-tracked the bill for approval and amended another bill (SB508)
to include the same language. The legislation could be voted on as
early as Wednesday.

If this bill passes, it will be a
huge blow to the movement against mass incarceration. People inside
prisons play a leading role in these struggles, and their perspectives,
analysis, and strategies are essential to our work. Incarcerated and
formerly incarcerated people who write books, contribute to newspapers,
or even write for our Voices from the Inside section would run the risk
of legal consequences just for sharing their ideas.

That’s
why we are asking you to take action TUESDAY OCTOBER 14 by calling
Pennsylvania lawmakers to tell them that prisoners should not be denied
the right to speak.

Please call your legislators and
demand that they vote NO on HB2533 and SB508. You can look up contact
information at
http://www.legis.state.pa.us/cfdocs/legis/home/findyourlegislator/.

We are also asking folks to call the following Senate leaders and ask them to stop the bill from moving forward:

Senate Majority Whip Pat Browne (717) 787-1349

Senate Minority Whip Anthony Williams (717) 787-5970

Senate Majority Leader Dominic Pileggi (717) 787-4712

Senate Minority Leader Jay Costa (717) 787-7683

Not sure what to say on the phone? Click here for a sample call script.

Want to write a letter to your legislators, or looking for more talking points? Click here for more info!

- See more at: http://decarceratepa.info/freespeech#sthash.TtdN3AkI.dpuf

President Obama has delegated review of Chelsea Manning’s clemency appeal to individuals within the Department of Defense. Please write them to express your support for heroic
WikiLeaks’ whistle-blower former US Army intelligence analyst PFC
Chelsea Manning’s release from military prison.
It is important that each of these authorities realize the wide
support that Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning enjoys worldwide. They
need to be reminded that millions understand that Manning is a political
prisoner, imprisoned for following her conscience. While it is highly
unlikely that any of these individuals would independently move to
release Manning, a reduction in Manning’s outrageous 35-year prison
sentence is a possibility at this stage.Take action TODAY – Write letters supporting Chelsea’s clemency petition to the following DoD authorities:Secretary of the Army John McHugh

101 Army Pentagon
Washington, DC 20310-0101

The Judge Advocate General
2200 Army Pentagon
Washington, DC 20310-2200

The letter should focus on your support for Chelsea Manning, and
especially why you believe justice will be served if Chelsea Manning’s
sentence is reduced. The letter should NOT be anti-military as this will be unlikely to help

A suggested message: “Chelsea Manning has been
punished enough for violating military regulations in the course of
being true to her conscience. I urge you to use your authorityto reduce
Pvt. Manning’s sentence to time served.” Beyond that general message,
feel free to personalize the details as to why you believe Chelsea
deserves clemency.

Consider composing your letter on personalized letterhead -you can create this yourself (here are templates and some tips for doing that).

A comment on this post will NOT be seen by DoD authorities–please send your letters to the addresses above

This clemency petition is separate from Chelsea Manning’s upcoming
appeal before the US Army Court of Criminal Appeals next year, where
Manning’s new attorney Nancy Hollander will have an opportunity to
highlight the prosecution’s—and the trial judge’s—misconduct during last
year’s trial at Ft. Meade, Maryland.

WASHINGTON — The United States will restore full diplomatic relations with Cuba
and open an embassy in Havana for the first time in more than a
half-century after the release of an American contractor held in prison
for five years, American officials said Wednesday.

In a deal
negotiated during 18 months of secret talks hosted largely by Canada and
encouraged by Pope Francis, who hosted a final meeting at the Vatican,
President Obama and President Raúl Castro of Cuba agreed in a telephone
call to put aside decades of hostility to find a new relationship
between the United States and the island nation just 90 miles off the
American coast.

“We will end an outdated approach that for
decades has failed to advance our interests and instead we will begin to
normalize relations between our two countries,” Mr. Obama said in a
nationally televised statement from the White House. The deal will
“begin a new chapter among the nations of the Americas” and move beyond a
“rigid policy that’s rooted in events that took place before most of us
were born.”

The contractor, Alan P. Gross, traveled on an
American government plane to the United States late Wednesday morning,
and the United States sent back three Cuban spies who had been in an
American prison since 2001. American officials said the Cuban spies were
swapped for a United States intelligence agent who had been in a Cuban
prison for nearly 20 years, and said Mr. Gross was not technically part
of the swap, but was released separately on “humanitarian grounds.”

In
addition, the United States will ease restrictions on remittances,
travel and banking relations, and Cuba will release 53 Cuban prisoners
identified as political prisoners by the United States government.
Although the decades-old American embargo on Cuba will remain in place
for now, the president called for an “honest and serious debate about
lifting” it.

“These 50 years have shown that isolation has not worked,” Mr. Obama said. “It’s time for a new approach.”

Addressing
critics of his new approach, he said he shares their commitment to
freedom. “The question is how do we uphold that commitment,” he said. “I
do not believe we can keep doing the same thing for over five decades
and expect a different result.”

Mr. Gross’s sister, Bonnie
Rubinstein, was “beyond ecstatic” at the news of his release, according
to her husband, Harold. “We are extremely grateful that he’s on his way
home,” Mr. Rubinstein said by telephone from Dallas. “It’s been a long
ordeal.”

Mr. Obama spoke with Mr. Castro by telephone on Tuesday
to finalize the agreement in a call that lasted more than 45 minutes,
the first direct contact between the leaders of the two countries in
more than 50 years, American officials said.

Diplomatic relations
between the United States and Cuba were severed in January 1961 after
the rise of Fidel Castro and his Communist government. Mr. Obama has
instructed Secretary of State John Kerry to immediately initiate
discussions with Cuba about re-establishing diplomatic relations and to
begin the process of removing Cuba from the list of states that sponsor
terrorism, which it has been on since 1982, the White House said.

Officials
said they would re-establish an embassy in Havana and carry out
high-level exchanges and visits between the two governments within
months. Mr. Obama will send an assistant secretary of state to Havana
next month to lead an American delegation to the next round of talks on
Cuban-American migration. The United States will also begin working with
Cuba on issues like counternarcotics, environmental protection and
human trafficking.

The United States will also ease travel
restrictions across all 12 categories currently envisioned under limited
circumstances in American law, including family visits, official visits
and journalistic, professional, educational and religious activities,
public performances, officials said. Ordinary tourism, however, will
remain prohibited.

Mr. Obama will also allow greater banking ties
and raise the level of remittances allowed to be sent to Cuban
nationals to $2,000 every three months from the current limit of $500.
Intermediaries forwarding remittances will no longer require a specific
license from the government. American travelers will also be allowed to
import up to $400 worth of goods from Cuba, including up to $100 in
tobacco and alcohol products.

“This is being done because we
believe the policy of the past has not worked and we believe the best
way to bring democracy and prosperity to Cuba is through a different
kind of policy,” a senior administration official told reporters on a
conference call under White House ground rules that did not permit the
official to be identified.

But the official said the shift would
not diminish the American focus on human rights in Cuba. “Our emphasis
on human rights will be just as strong and we believe more effective
under this policy,” the official said. “We will engage directly with the
Cuban government on human rights.”

Mr. Gross’s health has been
failing. He has reportedly lost more than 100 pounds in prison and is
losing vision in his right eye. He went on a nine-day hunger strike in
April. After turning 65 in May, he told relatives that he might try to
kill himself if not released soon.

Three members of Congress were
on the plane that picked up Mr. Gross in Cuba on Wednesday and
accompanied him back to the United States, officials said: Senator
Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, Senator Jeff Flake, Republican of
Arizona, and Representative Chris Van Hollen, Democrat of Maryland.

Other
Democratic and Republican lawmakers were sharply critical of the deal.
“Let’s be clear, this was not a ‘humanitarian’ act by the Castro regime.
It was a swap of convicted spies for an innocent American,” said
Senator Robert Menendez, Democrat of New Jersey and the chairman of the
Foreign Relations Committee. “President Obama’s actions have vindicated
the brutal behavior of the Cuban government.”

Senator Marco Rubio
of Florida, considered a prospect for the 2016 Republican presidential
nomination, told The Associated Press: “This is going to do absolutely
nothing to further human rights and democracy in Cuba. But it
potentially goes a long way in providing the economic lift that the
Castro regime needs to become permanent fixtures in Cuba for generations
to come.”

Mr. Gross was in Cuba to deliver satellite telephone
equipment that was capable of cloaking connections to the Internet when
he was arrested in 2009. The Cuban authorities, who tightly control
access to the Internet in their country, initially said he was a spy,
and a court there convicted him of bringing in the devices without a
permit as part of a subversive plot to “destroy the revolution.”

Mr.
Gross’s case drew increasing attention as his health deteriorated. He
grew despondent and talked of suicide, and his wife, Judy Gross, and
other supporters made urgent pleas for his release, but off-and-on
diplomatic talks seemed to go nowhere.

Cuba has often raised the
case of three of its spies serving federal prison time in Florida,
saying they had been prosecuted unjustly and urging that they be
released on humanitarian grounds. State Department officials insisted
that the cases were not comparable and that Mr. Gross was not an
intelligence agent.

Mr. Gross worked for Development
Alternatives, of Bethesda, Md., and had traveled to more than 50
countries as an international development worker. The company had a $6
million contract with the United States Agency for International
Development to distribute equipment that could get around Cuba’s
Internet blockade, and Mr. Gross had made four previous trips to Cuba in
2009.

The Rev. Jesse Jackson, the former New Mexico governor and
cabinet secretary Bill Richardson and several members of Congress
appealed for Mr. Gross’s release, along with Jewish advocacy groups in
the United States.

After visiting Mr. Gross in November, Senator
Jeff Flake, Republican of Arizona and a longtime advocate of loosening
the 50-year-old American trade embargo with Cuba, said he was optimistic
that the case would be resolved.

American lawmakers who have
drawn attention to Mr. Gross’s case celebrated his departure from Cuba.
“Today, news of Alan’s release brings great relief to his loved ones and
to every American who has called for his freedom,” said Senator Jerry
Moran, Republican of Kansas. “I admire Alan’s strength and that of his
wife Judy, who has worked tirelessly for years to free Alan and reunite
her family.”

The American government has spent $264 million over
the last 18 years, much of it through the development agency, in an
effort to spur democratic change in Cuba. The agency said in November
that it would cease the kinds of operations that Mr. Gross was involved
in when he was arrested, as well as those, disclosed by The Associated
Press, that allowed a contractor to set up a Twitter-like social network
that hid its ties to the United States government.

SOLITARY
confinement can be psychologically damaging for any inmate, but it is
especially perverse when it is used to discipline children and
teenagers. At juvenile detention centers and adult prisons and jails
across the country, minors are locked in isolated cells for 22 hours or
more a day. Solitary confinement is used to punish misbehavior, to
protect vulnerable detainees or to isolate someone who may be violent or
suicidal. But this practice does more harm than good. It should end.A
major study
by the Department of Justice in 2003 showed that more than 15 percent
of young people in juvenile facilities, some as young as 10, had been
held in solitary. My own research,
for Human Rights Watch and the American Civil Liberties Union,
suggested that the practice of putting teenagers in solitary was more
widespread in adult jails and prisons. A recent Justice Department investigation found that at any given time in 2013 as many as a quarter of adolescents held at New York City’s Rikers Island
were in solitary confinement. Dozens had been sentenced to more than
three months in solitary. Still others were held longer, for more than
six months.

Only six states have laws on the books that prohibit
certain forms of isolation in juvenile facilities. No state — nor the
federal government — has banned the solitary confinement of teens in
adult jails and prisons.

I have interviewed scores of young
people about being in solitary. Their stories haunt me. I spoke with
girls who told me that the experience brought back traumatic memories of
rape and abuse. Other kids talked about losing control of themselves,
of banging their heads against the walls of their cell. Many teens spoke
in disturbing detail about suicidal thoughts and suicide attempts. One
girl who spent four months in solitary confinement in a county jail at
16, ostensibly to be protected from adults there, told me that solitary
was “a dark place.” Though there were lights in her cell, she said, “It
is like being sunk in a hole.” A boy who had been alone for months in a
county jail at 15 told me that isolation turned his thoughts to “the
death-oriented side of life.”

A recent Justice Department review
of suicides in juvenile facilities found that more than half of the
minors who had killed themselves had done so in isolation. And in adult
jails, department data released
this fall identified more than 40 teenagers who had committed suicide
since 2000; the suicide rate for minors in adult prisons was twice as
high as that for older inmates. A recent study at Rikers Island found that adolescents there were significantly more likely to harm themselves.

A
vast majority of children subjected to solitary confinement are in
state facilities (where tens of thousands of children are held) and it
will be up to each state to initiate reform. States should remove all
minors from adult jails and prisons and ban solitary confinement. New
York has led the way on the latter by pledging to end solitary for 16-
and 17-year-olds held as adults in its prisons and in jail at Rikers
Island.

The federal government should also set an example. There
are only 65 juveniles currently held by the Department of Justice in
facilities across the country, but there are indications that conditions
there are also poor. Last year, following a visit to one juvenile
prison with a federal contract, the A.C.L.U. of Montana reported
that, when disciplined, the juvenile prisoners were put into isolated
gray and white cells “with frosted windows and doors without windows,”
where “they receive one hour of outdoor recreation seven days per week,
but their ability to participate in out-of-cell education or other
programming ceases.” The A.C.L.U. found that juvenile prisoners were
sometimes kept in disciplinary isolation for up to 90 days.Attorney
General Eric H. Holder Jr.
should immediately direct the Bureau of Prisons to outlaw the solitary
confinement of juveniles. The federal government already prohibits
the detention of juveniles with adults in federal prisons (a rule that
states should emulate). Mr. Holder could also direct the bureau to
develop new policies to strictly regulate any use of even short periods
of isolation.

Mr. Holder could then direct the Justice
Department’s Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention to
promote these policies as model practices, much like the national guidelines on education in juvenile facilities that Mr. Holder and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan announced last week.

Young
inmates should be managed in a way that promotes their healthy growth
and development. Their fundamental rights must be protected. The Annie
E. Casey Foundation recently revised its inspection standards,
calling for isolation to be used only for children who posed an
immediate risk to themselves or others; after other techniques had
failed; only for as long as it took for a child to regain control of
himself (it should be measured in minutes, not hours or days); and never
for longer than four hours or as a punishment. These standards echo
statements by the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.

That
the practice is widespread remains a disturbing indicator of how poorly
we treat the hundreds of thousands of minors arrested each year in the
United States. They are still maturing into adulthood. Solitary
confinement can sabotage both their rehabilitation and their growth. It
should be banned.

Ian M. Kysel is an adjunct professor and a fellow at the Human Rights Institute at Georgetown University Law Center.

Last year, the median net worth of upper-income families
reached $639,400, nearly seven times as much of those in the middle,
and nearly 70 times the level of those at the bottom of the income
ladder.

There has been growing attention to the issue of income
inequality, particularly the plight of those earning the federal minimum
wage of $7.25 an hour.Although income and wealth are related (the more
you make, the more you can save), the wealth gap zeros in on a different
aspect of financial well-being: how much money and other assets you
have accumulated over time, including the value of your home and car
plus any stocks and bonds. Think of it as “a measure of the family ‘nest
egg,'” as Pew calls it — a hoard that can sustain a household during an
emergency, like the loss of a job, and in the long run can see someone
through retirement.

While those at the top have managed to recoup
some of the wealth lost during the financial crisis, middle-income
families have not made any gains.

“The Great Recession destroyed a
significant amount of middle-income and lower-income families’ wealth,
and the economic ‘recovery’ has yet to be felt for them,” the report
concluded.

Pew, which used data from the Federal Reserve, defined
middle income as $44,000 a year for a family of four, while a yearly
income of $132,000 for the same-size family pushed a household into the
upper ranks. About one in five families qualifies for that higher
status, while 46 percent occupy the middle range.

The median
household net worth last year for those in the middle was $96,500, only
slightly above the $94,300 mark it hit in 1983 (after being adjusted for
inflation). A poor household actually had a higher median net worth 30
years ago ($11,400 in 1983) than it counted last year ($9,300).

Compare
those results with the top fifth of income earners. In 1983, when the
Fed began collecting the data, that group had a median wealth of
$318,000; in 2013 it owned more than twice that.

Other economists have traced the growing wealth gap to a much narrower slice of the population. In a working paper recently released by the National Bureau of Economic Research,
Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman argued, “The rise in wealth inequality
is almost entirely due to the rise of the top 0.1 percent wealth share,
from 7 percent in 1979 to 22 percent in 2012.” The share of wealth
controlled by the bottom 90 percent of Americans, they concluded, has
steadily declined since the mid-1980s.

The report on Wednesday is
the second in a week from Pew detailing how different groups of
Americans are faring financially more than five years after the
recession ended. The earlier study
found a growing racial and ethnic wealth gap, with whites registering a
median wealth of nearly $142,000, 13 times the net worth of blacks and
10 times that of Hispanics.

The latest report highlights how the
fortunes of the middle class have eroded. And the results, the report
said, “could help explain why, by other measures, the majority of
Americans are not feeling the impact of the economic recovery, despite
an improvement in the unemployment rate, stock market and housing
prices.”

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4) Panel to Set Terms to End Abusive Reign at Los Angeles County Jail System

The
Los Angeles County jail system, the nation’s largest, agreed Tuesday to
impose sweeping changes, a year after guards were charged with
regularly beating prisoners and supervisors in the Sheriff’s Department
were accused of seeking to thwart a federal investigation into
corruption and violence in the jails.

Under the agreement, dozens
of new policies will be implemented by a panel that will hold wide sway
over the administration of the jails. The three-person panel, appointed
by a federal court, will be responsible for curbing a decades-old
culture of violence administered by sheriff’s deputies who act as guards
in the 15,000-inmate system.

During the past year, disclosures
about corruption and brutality inside the jails have led to the
conviction of seven sheriff’s lieutenants, sergeants and deputies on
federal charges, the federal indictment of others, and a number of
lawsuits won by inmates.One of the claims in the class action lawsuit that
led to Tuesday’s agreement said that a group of deputies, acting as a
de facto gang in the county’s jails, wore tattoos on the back of their
necks and awarded one another points for breaking prisoners’ bones. That
lawsuit was settled on Tuesday when the Los Angeles County Board of
Supervisors agreed to enter into a federal consent decree; the agreement
involved neither financial damages nor an admission of wrongdoing by
the Sheriff’s Department.

Lee Baca, a former sheriff, who oversaw
the jails but denied that the system had widespread problems, resigned
abruptly in January. He said his decision to step down before completing
his fourth four-year term was unrelated to the jail scandal.

The
current sheriff, Jim McDonnell, who was elected in November, has
pledged to reform the department and the jail system. He served on the
Citizens’ Commission on Jail Violence that in 2012 issued a scathing
report, finding that jail guards resorted to force against inmates far
too often. The group, made up of former federal judges and prosecutors,
also concluded that Sheriff Baca had failed to monitor or control the
use of force in jails.

Though the county’s jails have for decades
had a reputation for violence by sheriff’s deputies, most of the
complaints had come from current or former inmates, whose credibility
was challenged by the Sheriff’s Department. But a 2011 report by
the American Civil Liberties Union, in which a prison chaplain and
others described violence at the hands of deputies, led to the
appointment of the civilian commission by the Board of Supervisors.

Tuesday’s
agreement gave the federal panel the authority to develop a corrective
plan and to monitor compliance. Its members, who will visit county jails
regularly, were chosen by lawyers for Los Angeles County and
representatives of inmates and former inmates.

Under the panel’s
recommendations, put into effect after the Board of Supervisors’ vote,
jail guards will undergo extensive retraining. Those found to have used
excessive force will be fired — or will need a written explanation from
the Sheriff’s Department explaining why they were not. Each county jail
will be required to establish a unit to compile and document inmate
grievances and requests.

Also on Tuesday, the Board of Supervisors approved a $350,000 payment to Derek Griscavage, a former inmate who said he had been knocked unconscious during a beating by four or five deputies on Christmas Day in 2010.

Lawsuits
and various reports by watchdog groups into conditions inside the
county jails paint a picture of extreme cruelty by guards and a lack of
concern by their superiors.

Guards, according to the A.C.L.U.
report, routinely abused handcuffed or otherwise non-resisting inmates
with Tasers or pepper spray, employed chokeholds, punched and kicked
prisoners and slammed their heads into walls.

Deputies also
sought to provoke racial tensions to their advantage, using racial slurs
against African-American inmates and encouraging gang members to
assault rivals. In one case, guards punished an inmate by calling him
gay and forcing him to walk naked down a jail hallway in full view of
other prisoners, according to the A.C.L.U. report. The deputies then
placed him in a cell with two gang members who beat him and sexually
assaulted him for hours, sticking his head into a toilet while they
raped him.

As the F.B.I. investigated a potential cover-up of
abuses inside the jails, two sheriff’s sergeants went to the home of an
F.B.I. agent and tried to intimidate her into providing them with
details about the inquiry. The sergeants, Scott Craig, 50, and Maricela
Long, 46, were sentenced to 33 months and 24 months, respectively, in federal prison for their part in the attempted cover-up.

HAVANA
— They crowded around old, battered televisions in Havana and erupted
in tears and applause at a spectacle they could scarcely imagine, let
alone believe: President Raúl Castro, followed by President Obama, heralding a new era of relations between Cuba and the United States.

But
for Armando Gutiérrez, who operates a small inn in Havana, what it
really comes down to is beds. He needs better ones, and the usual
scramble to find them and other supplies often comes up empty.

Now, Mr. Gutiérrez hopes the salvation of his business is at hand.

“It
will be step by step for sure, but we are super happy, all of us
without words really to express this history,” Mr. Gutiérrez said by
phone — a phone he plans to replace with a better one if the United
States makes good on its pledge to send more telecommunications
equipment.As politically charged as Mr. Obama’s new stance may be in the
United States, the sweeping changes he outlined on Wednesday will have a much more profound impact on Cuba
— where isolation by the United States has fundamentally shaped the
island’s economy, its politics and even its sense of national identity.

For
decades, the American embargo of Cuba has been the political sword and
shield of the Castros, held responsible for stifling their nation’s
development, depriving their people of the most basic needs, and
justifying their tight control over all aspects of society.

Now
their powerful rival is promising significant expansions in travel,
exports and remittances to Cuba, the biggest erosion of the embargo
since it was imposed more than 50 years ago.

Experts say it will
bring a flood of new money to the island, potentially injecting new life
into the economy and, coupled with restored diplomatic ties,
transforming relations between the two countries in ways not seen since a
bearded rebel named Fidel came down from the Cuban mountains.

“This changes it all,” Carlos Alzugaray, a former Cuban diplomat who is close to the Castros, said from the island.

The
question is whether the increased exchange will simply prop up Cuba’s
moribund economy and government, or breed truly democratic change on the
island, something current American policy has not achieved.

“For
Cuba, this is an opportunity to speed up the processes of economic
reform, political liberalization and openness,” said Arturo Lopez-Levy, a
former Cuban intelligence analyst now at New York University.

Others
were more skeptical, having seen previous thaws that did not produce
dramatic change. They noted the 1996 American law known as Helms-Burton
that prevents widespread commerce, and questioned Cuba’s willingness to
open up as well.

“The regime will do everything in its power to
have maximum control over foreign investment, forms of employment, high
taxes, which have always been a great obstacle for economic and social
development,” said José Daniel Ferrer, who coordinates dissident groups
in Cuba. “Most of these resources will still be used to maintain a
repressive apparatus.”

For many Cubans living through the
incremental steps toward private enterprise that Mr. Castro set in
motion, the changes announced by Washington and Havana are welcomed as
much for their practical worth as for the historic sea change between
governments.

The Cuban economy is wobbly, and it may only worsen
as its chief patron, Venezuela, slides further into economic and
political difficulties. Cuba’s economy grew only 1.4 percent this year,
by the government’s own generally rosy statistics, despite significant
changes, including allowing the buying and selling of property and cars.

More
than 300,000 people have gone into business, and private farming has
grown. The government recently said it would convert state-owned
restaurants into private cooperatives, and it announced a plan last year
to do away with a dual currency system that makes tourism and other
goods expensive.

The hope among Cubans is that the new easing of
tension with the United States will accelerate the halting steps toward a
market economy, while still maintaining the social ideals of free
education and health care embedded in what Mr. Castro described on
Wednesday as a “prosperous and sustainable socialism.”

But in
order for the changes Mr. Obama envisions to work, Cuba will have to
loosen up in significant ways. The island’s vows to allow more private
enterprise and foreign investment have been far more limited than many
Cuban and international entrepreneurs have hoped for, with many saying
it is almost impossible for them to participate.

“We have
incredible problems,” said Nidialys Acosta, who set up a classic car
services business with about 20 associates. “We have to jump through so
many hoops.”

The survival of her business depends on two American
exports: spare parts for her cars and visitors to ride in them. From
now on, she hopes that both will be easier to come by. “I am jumping up
and down for joy,” said Ms. Acosta from her home in El Cerro, a Havana
neighborhood. “This is my Christmas gift.”

But while the Cuban
government has called the expansion of private enterprise essential to
reducing the inflated public sector that is burdening the economy, it
does not recognize Ms. Acosta’s business or many others. Getting parts
like headlamps, mirrors and tires for a 1959 Chevrolet Impala and paying
for them is extremely difficult and expensive because they cannot be
ordered from the United States, but have to be brought in person by
people traveling between Miami and Cuba, she said. Doing financial
transactions in Cuba is difficult, she said, because her business does
not officially exist.

“The regulations make it almost impossible to thrive,” she said, adding that the government needed “to be more flexible.”

Mr.
Obama’s potential willingness to remove Cuba from the State Department
list of states that sponsor terrorism could have a big impact, according
to Phil Peters, director of the Cuba Research Center in Alexandria, Va.
He said the designation has severely complicated Cuba’s ability to do
business with international banks, and Mr. Obama said Wednesday that the
designation would be reviewed.

“It dramatically raises the cost
of doing business” for Cuba, Mr. Peters said. “When Cuba does business
internationally, they have to use banks and payment channels that have
nothing to do with the United States.”

The Cuban economy has a
long list of ailments, including a shortage of cash, brain drain, anemic
foreign investment and a scarcity of food production, with nearly 80
percent of its food imported, said Ted Henken, a professor of Latin
American studies at Baruch College in New York.

“Without the U.S.
to blame,” he said, “the shortcomings of the Cuban government will be
much more transparent. The Cuban government will no longer be able to
blame the United States for the obstacles that entrepreneurs face. The
government will have to be able to explain why it’s so hard to get a
loan from a bank, get a cellphone, get access to broadband.”

“That’s
going to be revealed for what it is,” he added. “This thing is going to
cause rising expectations both outside and inside of Cuba.”

Many
Cuban entrepreneurs said they welcomed the change, regardless of the
bumps ahead. Niuris Higueras Martínez, founder and owner of popular
Atelier, one of the private restaurants known as paladars, said “this
news will bring what we need the most, market stability, affordable
goods.”

The ability of Americans to use credit cards and debit
cards — a specific point Mr. Obama made on Wednesday — would be a big
boost, she said, though it would require some adjustment in a country
where cash is king.

“All small-business owners like myself would
need to learn a banking and credit culture that does not exist yet,” she
said. “We will evolve, little by little. I don’t expect all of this to
happen quickly, but we are definitely all ready to integrate ourselves
in a new market economy.”

•A bill of over $40,000 for the 20 minutes it took a doctor to stitch a cut.

• An ambulance ride of only 200 feet that cost $3,421.

• A healthy, insured couple “slowly going under” because their premiums, co-pays and deductibles are now twice as high as their mortgage and food costs.

Over the past two years, the New York Times series Paying Till It Hurts
has examined the high costs of ordinary medical care in the United
States, exposing the reasons and chronicling the human fallout behind
the nation’s extraordinary $2.9 trillion medical bill. In response, more
than 10,000 readers shared individual experiences like the ones above.

But how does a collection of often
heartbreaking, often startling tales reflect national experiences and
attitudes? The available data did not answer all of my questions. So,
using reader comments as a starting point, The Times designed a
questionnaire with CBS News and conducted a national poll this month.

Here is a snapshot of the American experience with the cost of medical care.

Affording medical care is more of a hardship.

Reader comments and emails told of the
increasing burden of health care costs on many Americans. T.R. Ellis, a
freelancer in New York who has two healthy teenage daughters, wrote that
the relentless rise of premiums has forced the family into a
high-deductible plan, adding “For the first time, I will be paying
medical bills by borrowing against our home.”.

The poll bore out readers’ experiences:
Nearly half of respondents described the affordability of basic medical
care as a hardship for them and their family, up 10 points from a year
ago. While the Affordable Care Act has expanded insurance to millions of
Americans, including those with existing conditions, it does not
directly address cost. And cost is becoming increasingly problematic.

Out-of-pocket expenses have gone up.

Many readers, even those with good insurance
coverage, were surprised by rising out-of-pocket expenses. Tina H.
relayed how having her son’s broken arm set in a temporary splint in an
emergency room this year “cost us $3,500 out-of-pocket, even with decent
insurance.” The poll found that just more than half of Americans say
the amount of money they and their family have paid out of pocket for
health care and prescription drugs has gone up over the past few years,
and about a third of Americans said they have gone up a lot.

Why? Partly because newer insurance plans —
including policies under the Affordable Care Act — are designed to make
sure patients have “more skin in the game,” so they will be more
discriminating users of health care. Fixed co-pays, say $20 for a visit
to a doctor, are being replaced by requirements that patients contribute
a percentage of charges, which often ends up costing them far more.

Some Americans are less likely to get treatment because of cost.

Many readers wrote that they were avoiding
attending to medical conditions or symptoms because they could not
afford treatment or were worried about potential costs, even if they had
insurance. “My employer-paid plan has a $5K deductible, so I don’t get
medical services if I can help it,” said Ed, 61, from Winston-Salem,
N.C. “I forgo blood pressure meds and colonoscopy,” he continued, even
though his last test found polyps that should be monitored. While the
Affordable Care Act mandates the coverage of certain screening services
at no cost to patients, any resulting treatment means money out of
pocket.

Americans wish their doctors would discuss costs.

Although doctors in many other countries post
price lists in their offices, talking about money upfront is
traditionally taboo in American health care, and many readers complained
about being unable to discuss the issue with their doctors. Physicians
say they are unprepared for the discussion and do not know how much
treatments cost anyway, in part because of the uncertainties of
insurance reimbursement.

But many patients say they need the
information in order to manage health expenses. Here is what one reader
from Atchison, Kan., had to say: “Even when I have asked a
straightforward question like, ‘What is your standard cost for an
initial office visit?' doctor’s offices have simply refused to comment.
It is completely impossible for a medical consumer in this country to
have any information at all until the bill is received.”

Insurance paperwork is a problem for many Americans.

As I interviewed patients for the series and
requested bills and insurance statements, the burdens created by
America’s medical billing system came up again and again. One patient,
an attorney, said he had to take three days off from work to navigate
bills after a two-day hospital stay. Visiting patients in their homes, I
saw shelves containing binders brimming with bills and payment plans
after only minor illnesses.

One reader, Aaron Bassett of Laconia, N.H.,
relayed his tradition during his wife’s pregnancy: “Once a week I have
to spread out all the bills we’ve received on the dining room table and
try to cross reference them with the health insurance paperwork” to
determine which ones to pay.

Americans are eager for relief.

There
seems to be widespread agreement that medical prices are burdensome for
American patients, and new solutions are needed. But will the answer be
a market-based approach involving greater price transparency? More
regulation, focusing on price? A government-sponsored single-payer
health system, like that in Canada? Or allowing younger people to join
Medicare, the popular health insurance program for seniors? Many readers
surprised me by saying they could not wait to turn 65. As one reader
from Texas said: “I bought medicine in Mexico for 23 years before I
became eligible for the promised land of Medicare.”

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

7) South Carolina Judge Vacates Conviction of George Stinney in 1944 Execution

Calling it a “great and fundamental injustice,” a South Carolina judge on Wednesday vacated
the 1944 murder conviction of 14-year-old George J. Stinney Jr., the
youngest person executed in the United States in the last century.

Judge
Carmen T. Mullen of Circuit Court did not rule that the conviction of
Mr. Stinney for the murder of two white girls in the town of Alcolu was
wrong on the merits. She did find, however, that the prosecution had
failed in numerous ways to safeguard the constitutional rights of Mr.
Stinney, who was black, from the time he was taken into custody until
his death by electrocution.

The all-white jury could not be
considered a jury of the teenager’s peers, Judge Mullen ruled, and his
court-appointed attorney did “little to nothing” to defend him. His
confession was most likely coerced and unreliable, she added, “due to
the power differential between his position as a 14-year-old black male
apprehended and questioned by white, uniformed law enforcement in a
small, segregated mill town in South Carolina.”

The order was a
rare application of coram nobis, a legal remedy that can be used only
when a conviction was based on an error of fact or unfairly obtained in a
fundamental way and when all other remedies have been exhausted.

“I
am not aware of any case where someone who was convicted has had the
trial conviction and sentence vacated after they’d been executed,” said
Miller W. Shealy Jr., a professor at the Charleston School of Law and
one of the lawyers who worked on behalf of the Stinney family to have
the conviction thrown out.

Ernest A. Finney III, the solicitor
who had opposed the request on the state’s behalf — and a son of the
first black State Supreme Court justice since Reconstruction — had
argued in a two-day hearing in January that the conviction was valid under the legal system in place at the time. He did not return calls for comment.

At
the hearing, in Sumter, Mr. Stinney’s two sisters testified, and a
videotaped deposition from his brother was played. They spoke of the
morning in March 1944 when the two girls, Betty June Binnicker, 11, and
Mary Emma Thames, 7, were seen riding bicycles by the pastures in rural
Alcolu. The girls’ bodies were found the next morning in a ditch, their
skulls crushed. Mr. Stinney was taken into custody within hours, and
confessed to the murders that day.Two white men who had helped search
for the girls also testified, and a cellmate of Mr. Stinney’s recounted
conversations in which Mr. Stinney said he was innocent and had been
made to confess. Less than three months passed between the murder and
the execution; the trial and sentencing took less than a day.

Some
of the problems of due process highlighted in the ruling were not rare
in the Jim Crow South. Still, Mr. Shealy cautioned that this case was
exceptional, due in part to Mr. Stinney’s age. Judge Mullen also
emphasized that it should not become a standard resort for families
grieving over decades-old injustices.

“The extraordinary circumstances discussed herein simply do not apply in most cases,” she wrote.

SAN FRANCISCO — The Arctic continues to warm faster than the rest of the globe, and with greater repercussions, scientists are reporting.

The new findings appear in the Arctic Report Card,
first published in 2006 by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration and updated annually. The report card catalogs the
wide-ranging changes caused by the rising temperatures, in large part
driven by emissions of greenhouse gases.

Snow cover, measured
since 1967, was below average and set a record low in April in the
Eurasian region of the Arctic. Sea surface temperatures are rising,
particularly in the Chukchi Sea, northwest of Alaska, where the waters
are warming at a rate of almost one degree Fahrenheit per decade.

The
extent of Arctic sea ice, which retreats in summer, did not hit a
record low in 2014. But it was the sixth lowest since satellite
measurements began in 1979, and the scientists noted that the eight
smallest extents have occurred in the last eight years.

“We can’t
expect records every year,” Martin Jeffries of the Office of Naval
Research, who edited this year’s report, said at a news conference here
at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union. “It need not be
spectacular for the Arctic to continue to be changing.”

With less
sea ice and more open water, sunlight entered more of the ocean,
leading to a bloom of tiny marine plants. On land, the greenness of the
tundra continues to increase, the report said, indicating fewer
snow-covered areas.

The decline in sea ice also diminished the
number of polar bears in western Hudson Bay in Canada from 1987 to 2011,
but populations appeared to be stable elsewhere. Polar bears rely on
sea ice to travel and hunt.

In Greenland, scientists observed
that melting occurred on almost 40 percent of the ice sheet during the
summer, and in August, the ice sheet reflected less of the sunlight than
at any time since the beginning of satellite observations in 2000. In a
separate news conference, scientists reported that NASA satellite
measurements have confirmed that a darker, less reflective Arctic
absorbs more heat and accelerates melting.

The mass of the
Greenland ice sheet, however, remained steady from 2013 to 2014,
compared with major losses two years ago. The report card also noted the
unusual jet-stream wind pattern last winter, often labeled the polar vortex,
that led to frigid weather across much of the United States but balmy
temperatures in Alaska.The NASA reflectivity measurements found that
since 2000, the amount of absorbed solar radiation in the Arctic during
the summer months rose 5 percent. No significant change was seen for the
rest of the planet. The Arctic areas with the greatest increases
corresponded to the areas of declining sea ice. The change is equivalent
to a 10-watt light bulb shining over every square meter, or 10.76
square feet, of the Arctic Ocean. In areas of greater warming, like the
Beaufort Sea north of Alaska, the increase is 50 watts per square meter.

Many
scientists expect the Arctic to become ice-free in summer by the end of
the century, with some predicting that it could happen much sooner.

“I
think the important point about the models is not to dwell on the fact
that they differ, but it is to dwell on the similarities,” Dr. Jeffries
said. “They all point in the same direction.” The decline of ice will
continue to affect life in the Arctic. It will also open up shipping
lanes and the possibility of oil drilling. “You don’t have to go to zero
for these to become a big deal,” Dr. Jeffries said.

Year-to-year
variability also remains large, so much so that it is not certain that
the extent of sea ice will shrink in the near future.

“If someone
asked me if sea ice is going to go up or down in a decade, I’d flip a
coin,” said Jennifer Kay, an atmospheric scientist at the University of
Colorado. But she also had no doubts about the long-term trend toward a
warmer Arctic with less ice.

“If it’s 30 or 40 years out,” she said, “I have no need to flip a coin.”

MIAMI
— They were known as the Cuban Five, members of a spy ring that
descended on South Florida in the 1990s and infiltrated exile groups and
military installations.

They, along with other members of the
ring, tried to make themselves indispensable to the exile groups whose
secrets they stole. One of the operatives worked at the Naval Air
Station in Key West, while another worked undercover in Tampa.

“They
were very good,” said Ramón Saúl Sánchez, the founder of the Movimiento
Democracia, one of the exile organizations that was infiltrated. “When
you trust somebody who you honestly believe is struggling for the good
of your people, and suddenly you see that person was actually an agent
of the oppressor against your struggle, of course you feel betrayed.”

Another operative, who managed to avoid being one of the Cuban Five by fleeing back to Cuba,
had even married a local woman from church.Once their cover was blown
in 1998 and federal agents smashed the ring, several of its members
pleaded guilty to various charges, but the Cuban Five instead went to
trial. They were convicted in 2001 and sentenced to long prison terms.

In
Cuba, they were known as the Five Heroes. Their photographs were
displayed on billboards throughout the country and their case became a
cause célèbre at home. As the years passed and courts in the United
States reduced the sentences of some of the men, Cuban officials
clamored for their return, arguing that the infiltrations had been
necessary to monitor potential terrorist actions planned against Cuba
from Florida.

Various activists in the United States and abroad
also began advocating their release. After two of the men served their
terms and went back to Cuba, those efforts concentrated on the remaining
three.

On Wednesday, those men — Gerardo Hernández, 49; Antonio
Guerrero, 56, an American citizen; and Ramón Labañino, 51 — were
released and flown to Cuba as part of the sweeping and extraordinary shift in the relations between Washington and Havana.

As
part of that shift, Alan P. Gross, the American contractor detained in
Cuba in December 2009 on accusations of being a spy, also returned home
on Wednesday, landing at Andrews Air Force Base near Washington.

“I’m free,” he told his two adult daughters in telephone calls from the plane, shortly before speaking with President Obama.

It
had been just hours since Mr. Gross, who spent most of the last five
years locked in a cramped cell at a military hospital in Havana for at
least 23 hours a day, had received word from his lawyer that he was to
be released. “I’ll believe it when I see it,” Mr. Gross, 65, had said.

Also
released on Wednesday, according to a senior American official, was
Rolando Sarraf Trujillo, a Cuban who had provided information that
helped lead to the breakup of the spy ring and other Cuban espionage
operations in the United States. His release was first reported by Newsweek.com.

Multiple
news accounts in recent years have identified Mr. Trujillo as a former
Cuban intelligence officer who has been in prison in Cuba on espionage
charges since 1995. The accounts named him as a possible candidate to be
freed if the United States and Cuba were ever to agree to a spy swap.

The
news of the Cuban prisoners’ release was most significant in the case
of Mr. Hernández, who had been serving two life sentences and was the
only one of the group charged with conspiracy to commit murder. American
investigators accused him of having previous knowledge of the Castro
government’s plans to shoot down two exile organization planes that
regularly flew missions near Cuba. The planes were shot down in 1996,
killing four anti-Castro volunteers.

“They did not have to give
up Gerardo Hernández,” said Maggie Alejandre Khuly, whose brother,
Armando Alejandre Jr., was one of the volunteers who was killed. “It’s
very poor negotiations when something is stolen from you — Alan Gross —
and to regain stolen property, you have to give up more in return. Cuba
is getting everything. It doesn’t make sense.”

Richard C. Klugh, a
Miami lawyer who represented the five spies, said that two of his
clients, Mr. Hernandez and Mr. Guerrero, were suddenly transferred last
week.

“Gerardo was moved from an extremely violent, terrible
prison to Butner, N.C., so there was some hope that was something going
on,” Mr. Klugh said. “Gerardo is the one for whom this is the most
emotional. He and his wife were essentially newlyweds and have been
separated for 16 years, and it’s extremely emotional.”

Mr.
Guerrero, 56, who was born in South Florida and studied engineering in
Ukraine, was scheduled to be released in 2017. Mr. Labañino, 51, is a
native of Havana who studied economics at the University of Havana.
Originally sentenced to life plus 18 years, he was resentenced to 30
years, and was expecting to be released in 2024.

“I just spoke to
them on the phone, and you cannot imagine the emotion,” Dimitri Dimis, a
member of an international committee dedicated to obtaining the release
of the men, said by telephone from Havana. “It’s amazing! We were just
at the White House protesting in June. We had another one planned for
2015, and we will happily no longer have to plan any more protests.”

In
2009, Mr. Gross lived in Potomac, Md., and traveled to Cuba on a
contract with the United States Agency for International Development for
a project to improve Internet access for the Jewish community there. He
took with him cellphones, wireless devices, computers and network
equipment. On the final night of his fifth visit there that year, Mr.
Gross was arrested and told he was being investigated for smuggling
contraband.

On Wednesday, he called Mr. Obama’s surprise
announcement that the United States would restore full diplomatic
relations with Cuba “a game-changer, which I fully support.”

For
Mr. Gross, a New York native who trained as a social worker and then
traveled the world as an international development specialist, his
release was the end of an ordeal that at times seemed hopeless.

“It’s good to be home,” he said at a news conference in Washington,
appearing gaunt but cheerful in khakis and a blue shirt. “It’s the best Hanukkah I’ll be celebrating in a long time.”

In
captivity, Mr. Gross lost more than 100 pounds, five teeth and most of
the sight in his right eye, as well as some mobility, after being
confined to an 8-and-a-half-by-11-foot cell. He contemplated suicide,
telling recent visitors that he would not celebrate his birthday next
year in Cuba.

The
judge who oversaw the grand jury investigating the death of Eric Garner
has recused himself from considering a request to release transcripts
of the proceedings, citing the potential appearance of a conflict of
interest involving his wife, officials said on Wednesday.

The
judge, Justice Stephen J. Rooney of State Supreme Court on Staten
Island, was to hear arguments on Friday on whether to release
transcripts from the grand jury that decided this month not to bring criminal charges against Officer Daniel Pantaleo, who placed Mr. Garner into a chokehold during an arrest that led to his death in July.

On
Wednesday, the judge met with the parties seeking the transcripts —
including the city’s public advocate and the New York Civil Liberties
Union — and told them of the conflict: His wife, Kathryn K. Rooney, is a
board chairwoman of the hospital, Richmond University Medical Center, whose emergency medical workers responded
after Mr. Garner was fatally injured.With Justice Rooney’s recusal, the
hearing was postponed until a new judge can be assigned and a hearing
date set, probably in January.

The grand jury’s decision set off nationwide protests and brought immediate calls for the release of the full testimony.

The
potential appearance of a conflict did not arise earlier for Justice
Rooney, said David Bookstaver, the spokesman for the New York State
court system, because judges do little more than swear in the jurors
during a grand jury proceeding, “The conflict doesn’t arise until there
is a request for the minutes themselves,” Mr. Bookstaver said.

Immediately
after the grand jury’s decision, the Staten Island district attorney,
Daniel M. Donovan Jr., requested that Justice Rooney release limited
information; he did not request the transcripts. The judge did not
recuse himself at that point, Mr. Bookstaver said, because of the
limited nature of that request.

Justice Rooney, 66, in his
response to Mr. Donovan, allowed for limited disclosures, among them
that the grand jury had heard from 50 witnesses, including emergency
medical personnel and doctors.

Reached by phone on Wednesday at
his home, Justice Rooney declined to discuss the case, his recusal or
its timing, but said he had never recused himself from a case before. “I
don’t think I ever have,” he said. “This is the first time.”

ON
Aug. 1, five students in satiny green-and-red robes and mortarboards
waited in an elementary school classroom to hear their names called as
graduates of Normandy High School. This ceremony, held months after the
official graduation, was mostly for students who had been short of
credits in May.

One of those new graduates was Michael Brown. He
was 18, his mother’s oldest son. He had been planning to start college
in September.

Eight days later, he was dead, killed in the
streets of nearby Ferguson, Mo., by a white police officer in a shooting
that ignited angry protests and a painful national debate about race,
policing and often elusive justice. Many news reports after Mr. Brown’s
death noted his graduation and his college plans. The implication was
that these scholarly achievements magnified the sorrow.

But if Michael Brown’s educational experience was a success story, it was a damning one.

The Normandy school district is among the poorest and most segregated in Missouri.
It ranks last in overall academic performance. Its rating on an annual
state assessment was so dismal that by the time Mr. Brown graduated the
district had lost its state accreditation.

About half of black
male students at Normandy High never graduate. Just one in four
graduates makes it to a four-year college. The college where Mr. Brown
was headed is a for-profit trade school that recruits those it once
described in internal documents as “Unemployed, Underpaid, Unsatisfied,
Unskilled, Unprepared, Unsupported, Unmotivated, Unhappy, Underserved!”

Just
five miles down the road from Normandy lies Clayton, the wealthy county
seat where a grand jury recently deliberated the fate of Darren Wilson,
the officer who killed Mr. Brown. Success there looks very different.
The Clayton public schools are predominantly white, with almost no
poverty to speak of. The district is regularly ranked in the top 10
percent in the state. More than 96 percent of its students graduate.
Eighty-four percent head to four-year universities.

Decades of
public and private housing discrimination made St. Louis one of the most
racially segregated metropolitan areas in the country. A network of
school district boundaries has, to this day, divided students in
racially separate schools as effectively as any Jim Crow law.

Michael
Brown’s education was not exceptional, then, but all too typical, and
it illustrates the vast disparity in resources and expectations for
black children in America’s stubbornly segregated educational system.

As
hundreds of school districts across the nation have been released from
court-enforced integration over the past 15 years, the number of what
researchers call “apartheid schools” — in which the white population is 1
percent or less — has shot up. The achievement gap, narrowed during the
height of school integration, has widened.

According to data compiled by the Department of Education,
black and Latino children nationwide are the least likely to be taught
by a qualified, experienced teacher; to be offered courses such as
chemistry and calculus; or to have access to technology.

“American
schools are disturbingly racially segregated — period,” Catherine
Lhamon, head of the Education Department’s civil rights office, said in a
speech in October.

Since Aug. 9, the day Mr. Brown’s lifeless
body lay for hours under a hot summer sun, St. Louis County has come to
illustrate the country’s racial fault lines in police conduct and the
criminalization of black youth. But most black youth will not die at the
hands of the police.

They share the fate that was already Michael Brown’s.

IN
1954, when the United States Supreme Court rejected the notion of
separate but equal schools in its Brown v. Board of Education decision,
St. Louis ran the second-largest segregated school district in the
country.

After the ruling, school officials promised to integrate
voluntarily. But the acceleration of white flight and the redrawing of
school district lines around black and white neighborhoods allowed
metropolitan St. Louis to preserve its racial divide. Nearly 30 years
later, 90 percent of black children in St. Louis still attended
predominantly black schools.

In 1983, a federal judge ordered a
desegregation plan for the entire metropolitan area. At its peak, some
15,000 St. Louis public school students a year attended 16 heavily white
suburban districts. Another 1,300 white students headed in the opposite
direction to 27 new magnet schools in St. Louis.

The program
left another 15,000 of St. Louis’s black students in segregated,
inferior schools. But for the transfer students who rode buses out of
the city, the plan successfully broke the deeply entrenched connection
between race, ZIP code and opportunity. Test scores for eighth- and
10th-grade transfer students rose. The transfer students were more
likely to graduate and go on to college. In surveys, white students
overwhelmingly said they had benefited from the opportunity to be
educated alongside black students. The St. Louis model was heralded as
the nation’s most successful metropolitan desegregation program.

But
from the moment it started, the St. Louis desegregation plan was under
assault. The cost would eventually reach $1.7 billion. In 1999 the
program was made entirely voluntary. Today, about 5,000 students get to
escape the troubles of the St. Louis public schools — a small fraction
of the number who apply for the privilege of doing so.

Incorporated
in 1945 and covering fewer than two square miles, Normandy became a
destination for St. Louis’s fleeing white working class.

Nedra
Martin’s family was among the black strivers who began to make their way
to Normandy in the 1970s. Ms. Martin, who still lives in Normandy and
works in human resources at Walmart, said her parents settled in the
town in 1975. They both worked in government jobs — her dad was a welder
for the city, her mom an aide in a state group home. But as black
families like the Martins moved in, “For Sale” signs went up and whites
fled to new exurbs.

After 1970, black enrollment in the Normandy
schools exploded, more than doubling within eight years to 6,200. By
1978, only St. Louis itself enrolled more black students than Normandy.

For
years, Normandy’s schools struggled to meet minimum state requirements
for student achievement. Then, in 2009, the state decided that the
Normandy school district would absorb the ailing Wellston school
district.

Wellston was also high-poverty, and held the
distinction of being Missouri’s only 100 percent black school system.
State officials had called conditions in Wellston’s schools “deplorable”
and “academically abusive.”

But one thing was clear: Its
students were not going to be absorbed into the high-performing, mostly
white districts nearby. Michael Jones, a state board of education
official, was blunt about the reason: “You’d have had a civil war.”

BY
the time Michael Brown was a high school junior, he had spent most of
his educational career in racially segregated and financially
disadvantaged schools. Behind in credits, he entered Normandy High in
the spring of 2013.

But
last year, the Normandy district was thrown an unlikely lifeline. Its
schools had failed so badly that the state had formally stripped it of
its accreditation. And the Missouri State Supreme Court had just upheld a
state law allowing students in unaccredited districts to transfer to
accredited ones.

For Nedra Martin, who had a daughter stuck in
Normandy’s failing schools, this was the miracle she had prayed for.
Just like that, the state’s decision erased the invisible, impenetrable
lines of segregation that had trapped her child. “I was elated,” Ms.
Martin said. “Just elated.”

Parents in the school district that
would have to take Normandy’s students were not. Normandy chose to
provide transportation for its transfer students to attend schools in
Francis Howell, an 85 percent white district 26 miles away. Officials
there held a public forum to address community concerns. More than 2,500
parents packed into the high school gymnasium.Would the district
install metal detectors? What about the violence their children would be
subjected to, an elementary school parent asked. Wouldn’t test scores
plummet? The issue wasn’t about race, one parent said, “but trash.”

Mah’Ria
Pruitt-Martin, a rising eighth grader, was sitting in the audience that
night with her mother. Hers was one of the few brown faces there, and
the girl said she wiped away tears.

“It made me heartbroken
because they were putting us in a box,” Mah’Ria said. “I was sitting
there thinking, ‘Would you want some other parents talking about your
kid that way?’ ”

In the fall of 2013, nearly 1,000 Normandy
students — about a quarter of the district’s enrollment — switched to
schools in accredited districts. More than 400 headed to Francis Howell.

Mah’Ria
said that she was, in fact, welcomed into her new middle school by
students and teachers. Despite the fears, recently released state data
show that with the exception of one district, test scores in the
transfer schools did not drop.

But there was a cruel twist. The
state required any failing district whose students were allowed to
transfer to pay the costs of their education in the adjoining districts.
The payments drained Normandy’s finances. Normandy closed a school and
laid off 40 percent of its staff.

“In order to save the district,
they killed the district,” said John Wright, a longtime St. Louis
educator who had spent stints as superintendent in both St. Louis and
Normandy.

The state then announced that it was taking over the
Normandy Public Schools district and reconstituting it as the Normandy
Schools Collaborative. As a new educational entity, the district got a
clean slate. It no longer was unaccredited, but operated as a “state
oversight district.” The transfer law, the state claimed, no longer
applied. One by one, transfer districts announced that Normandy children
were no longer welcome.

Ms. Martin and other parents sued,
asserting that the state had no legal authority to reconstitute the
district to change its accreditation status. On Aug. 15, after the
school year had begun in some districts, a state judge granted a
temporary injunction allowing the plaintiffs to enroll their children in
the transfer districts.

“Every day a student attends an
unaccredited school,” the judge wrote, the child “could suffer harm that
cannot be repaired.” The state is fighting the ruling, but most school
districts have reopened their doors to the transfer students.

When
asked whether black children in Missouri were receiving an equal
education, Commissioner Chris Nicastro, the state’s top education
official, paused, then inhaled deeply. “Do I think black children in
Missouri are getting in all cases the same education as their white
counterparts?” Ms. Nicastro said. “I’d have to say no.”

STUDENTS
who spend their careers in segregated schools can look forward to a life
on the margins, according to a 2014 study on the long-term impacts of
school desegregation by Rucker C. Johnson, an economist at the
University of California, Berkeley. They are more likely to be poor.
They are more likely to go to jail. They are less likely to graduate
from high school, to go to college, or to finish if they go. They are
more likely to live in segregated neighborhoods as adults. Their
children are more likely to attend segregated schools, repeating the
cycle.

“You know how hard it was for me to get him to stay in
school and graduate?” Michael Brown’s mother, Lesley McSpadden, cried on
the August day he died. “You know how many black men graduate? Not
many.”

Michael Brown was buried in the old St. Peter’s Cemetery.

It lies next to Normandy High School.

Nikole Hannah-Jones is reporter at ProPublica. This is an excerpt from a longer article published by ProPublica.

ST.
LOUIS — Missouri’s attorney general announced lawsuits against 13 of
this city’s suburbs on Thursday, accusing them of ignoring a law that
sets limits on revenue derived from traffic fines. The move comes after
widespread allegations of harassment and profiteering by small municipal
governments against the poor and minorities.

The attorney
general, Chris Koster, a Democrat, spoke in downtown St. Louis and
suggested that more sweeping changes could be needed to bring
municipalities into line.

Since the racially charged protests
over the death of Michael Brown at the hands of a police officer in
nearby Ferguson in August, demonstrators have frequently complained
about a perceived hypervigilance to minor traffic violations in St.
Louis County’s patchwork of 90 municipalities. Many of those cities have
their own courts and police departments, but some are only a few square
blocks in size and have populations smaller than some high schools.

“When
traffic ticketing is used to promote public safety, that’s
appropriate,” Mr. Koster said. “When traffic tickets are used to promote
revenue, that’s inappropriate.” Such practices, he said, are
“predatory.”

Ferguson, with roughly 20,000 residents, was not
among the suburbs sued by Mr. Koster, and is large compared with many
nearby cities in the northern part of the county, where many of the
suburbs sued by Mr. Koster are situated.

State law requires towns
to report the percentage of general operating revenue that comes from
fines for traffic violations, and limits their potential to profit by
requiring that proceeds beyond 30 percent be turned over to the state.

In
Normandy, a city near Ferguson, 38 percent of the revenue came from
fines and court costs. Mr. Koster sued five St. Louis municipalities
that he said failed to file any report, four that filed a report without
calculating a percentage, and four, including Normandy, that had
revenue over the limit.

At its meeting here this week, the
state-appointed Ferguson Commission discussed possible changes to
municipal courts. The 16-member commission was asked by Gov. Jay Nixon
to listen to residents and propose ideas for lasting social and
political changes around St. Louis. The commission’s leaders appeared
with Mr. Koster at Thursday’s announcement.

Many say young black
men, who are pulled over at a higher rate than whites in some St. Louis
County towns, are particularly affected by police officers’ enforcement
of traffic laws and municipal judges who impose fines. If defendants do
not pay their fines, they are sometimes jailed.

“We have heard
across the board, there’s broad agreement, that the municipal courts
create challenges for us,” said the Rev. Starsky Wilson, a Ferguson
Commission chairman. “Municipal courts are a focal point between
policing on the streets and community relations there and municipal
fragmentation.”

Mr. Koster said he had not reviewed Ferguson’s
records on traffic ticket revenue because the suburb’s report for the
last fiscal year is not yet due.

Mayor Francis G. Slay of St.
Louis, in a separate news conference Thursday, said that his city’s
municipal judges could now take into account someone’s financial means
when setting up payment schedules. Mr. Slay suggested that the region’s
other courts, where some defendants also struggle to pay, could look
into similar changes. But he cautioned that widespread implementation
outside St. Louis city limits might be a challenge.

“If you want
to get something done in the city, you know where to go,” Mr. Slay said.
“In the suburbs, there’s a lot of municipalities.”

Though
protests have continued on an almost daily basis, there are signs that
St. Louis is returning to some level of normality. Governor Nixon
allowed a monthlong state of emergency to expire on Wednesday, resulting
in the withdrawal of the Missouri National Guard.

But even with
the Guard gone, conversation continues about perceived racial inequities
around St. Louis. On Thursday, the American Civil Liberties Union filed
a federal lawsuit against the Ferguson-Florissant School District,
arguing that the district’s method of electing school board members
dilutes the influence of African-American voters. Only one of seven
board members is black, though African-Americans constitute a majority
of the student body.

UPPER
MARLBORO, Md. — “Judge Dawson, he don’t play,” a parent once said about
Herman C. Dawson, the main juvenile court judge in Prince George’s
County. And on this Tuesday morning, Judge Dawson was definitely not in a
playing mood.

“Who’s in court with you today?” he demanded of Tanika, the 16-year-old standing before him in handcuffs.

“My mom,” she said.

“I know that,” Judge Dawson snapped.

An
honors student, Tanika had never been in trouble with the law before.
But for the past year, ever since she was involved in a fight with
another girl at her high school, Judge Dawson had ruled her life,
turning it into a series of court hearings, months spent on house arrest
and weeks locked up at a juvenile detention center in Laurel, Md.

Most
recently, he had detained her for two weeks for violating probation by
visiting a friend on the way home from working off community service
hours. Now he was deciding whether to release her.

“I’m hesitating because I don’t know whether you got the message,” he said.

Juvenile
court judges in the United States are given wide discretion to decide
what is in a young offender’s best interest. Many, like Judge Dawson,
turn to incarceration, hoping it will teach disobedient teenagers a
lesson and deter them from further transgressions.

But evidence
has mounted in recent years that locking up juveniles, especially those
who pose no risk to public safety, does more harm than good. Most
juvenile offenders outgrow delinquent behavior, studies find. And
incarceration — the most costly alternative for taxpayers — appears to do little to prevent recidivism and often has the opposite effect, driving juveniles deeper into criminal behavior.

“Once
kids get in the system, they tend to come back, and the farther they
go, the more likely they are to keep going,” said Edward Mulvey, a
psychologist at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and the
author of a major study of delinquent youths.

Slowly,
policy makers have begun to heed this message. After decades when
states grew more punitive in their approach to juvenile crime, locking
up more and more youths, more than a dozen have now revised statutes or
regulations to avoid the overuse of incarceration, among them New Jersey
and Indiana.

But judges are not always so quick to follow. And
often the judges most resistant to change are those most determined to
help troubled youths, juvenile delinquency experts say.

Judge
Dawson is an example. Presiding in Courtroom D-15 of the mammoth county
courthouse here over cases that range from shoplifting to armed robbery,
he has won a reputation as a jurist who brooks no excuses and involves
himself deeply in the lives of the teenagers who come before him.

Raised
by a single mother in the segregated South, he subscribes to a “tough
love” philosophy that venerates hard work, education and personal
responsibility as the antidotes to poverty, negative peer pressure,
chaotic parenting and other forces that can tip children into
delinquency.

The juveniles who end up in his courtroom, Judge
Dawson says, have often been allowed to run wild without consequences.
“People have made too many excuses for them, and they end up believing
it,” he said in a recent interview.

But Judge Dawson’s critics,
who include defense lawyers, delinquency workers and some parents of
young offenders, say that in his zeal to reform wayward youths he goes
too far — acting not just as judge but also as prosecutor, probation
officer and social worker.

He relies too heavily on locking
juveniles up, these critics say, contributing to incarceration rates
that are among the highest in the state. His courtroom practices
sometimes violate young offenders’ due process rights. And in several
instances Judge Dawson has overstepped the law in an effort to keep
juveniles locked up for longer periods — in October, a state appeals
court ordered him to reconsider his disposition in four cases in which
he had set minimum periods of confinement for juveniles, saying that the
orders appeared to violate state law.

In
court, Judge Dawson, 60, likes to tell stories about his own childhood:
how he mowed lawns and shined shoes to earn money for college; how he
marched in civil rights protests without missing a day of school; how
his mother did not let him or his brothers play baseball on Sunday,
taking them to church instead.

“If I can make it out of Selma,
Alabama, with all the opportunities kids have now, why is it they can’t
take advantage of these opportunities and better themselves?” he asks.

A
compact, energetic man whose eyes constantly rove the courtroom, he
exchanges teasing barbs with lawyers, and is prone to high-pitched sighs
and digressions about golf and fishing. Appointed to the Circuit Court
in 1998 by Gov. Parris N. Glendening, a Democrat, and elected to a
15-year term in 2000, he is a well-known figure in this mostly black
county.

He speaks regularly at high schools and founded a
mentoring and scholarship program for troubled youths, often selecting
candidates from his courtroom. But a few months ago he halted the
program, he said, after complaints that his involvement was
inappropriate, given his role on the bench.

Judge Dawson says
that in court, where his docket can run to 75 or more cases a day, his
goal is to do whatever he can — including yelling, if necessary — to get
the attention of young offenders.

“If I can get one of these
black kids, Hispanic kids, get them out of high school and get them into
college, I’ve done my job,” Judge Dawson said.

To that end, he
engages juveniles in a wide-ranging public catechism, peppering them
with questions about school performance (“How many times were you
suspended last year?”), attire (“You can walk around in a fancy
hillbilly shirt but you can’t get an education?”) and behavior (“Why do
you do all these dumb things?”).

He routinely assigns dozens or
even hundreds of hours of community service and requires that they be
completed through the county’s work program, which charges a fee of $50
per case. He is adamant about restitution, bringing offenders back to
court repeatedly until victims have been paid. And while most other
judges waive court fees for juveniles, he insists on collecting them,
even when parents protest that they cannot afford to pay.

“You
are so lucky Judge Dawson is not here today, lucky, lucky, lucky,” a
public defender told one boy whose parents had not paid the fee, usually
$155.

But it is Judge Dawson’s use of incarceration that has stirred the most controversy.

In
Maryland, as in other states, the number of juveniles held in locked
facilities has declined over the past decade, a result of dropping
juvenile crime rates and increasing efforts to keep juveniles at home
when possible. A project in Baltimore led by the Annie E. Casey Foundation,
which is financing efforts in 39 states to develop alternatives to
locking up juveniles while protecting public safety, has helped decrease
the use of detention there by about 40 percent, according to state
statistics.

But in Prince George’s County, the rates of detention
and longer-term incarceration have remained high and have risen in the
more than five years Judge Dawson has presided as the primary juvenile
court judge, according to an analysis by the Maryland Department of Juvenile Services.

Commitments
to institutional settings increased 55 percent from 2009 to 2014,
while, statewide, commitments dropped an average of 5 percent over the
same period and complaints filed with the Juvenile Services Department —
an indicator of juvenile crime — decreased 63 percent.

Detentions
of juveniles from Prince George’s County in secure facilities have
risen 115 percent since 2005 — despite a slight decline since 2012 —
though they have dropped 29 percent statewide. Only 12 percent of the
juveniles were detained for committing new crimes. The rest were locked
up for violations stemming from old offenses.

Prosecutors in the county find in Judge Dawson a willing partner.

“If
they need to be detained, he’s not afraid to detain them,” said Yvonne
Robinson, the assistant state’s attorney in charge of juvenile cases.

But
public defenders believe that the high detention rates are driven in
part by the multitude of review hearings Judge Dawson schedules to
monitor juveniles’ progress. The hearings, the public defenders said,
place a teenager’s behavior under a microscope, allowing prosecutors to
seize on violations they might never have heard about otherwise.

“I
think he cares about the kids,” said Erin Josendale, chief of the
public defender’s juvenile division in Prince George’s County. “But
having that level of involvement, at least in our county, creates
significant due process concerns.”

In one of two interviews in
his chambers, Judge Dawson said that the reviews were needed because the
Juvenile Services Department often failed to properly monitor its
charges. And he defended his use of detention, saying that it was
sometimes the department that asked for a young offender to be detained.
For the most part, he said, he reserved incarceration for juveniles who
had repeatedly committed serious offenses.

“I am looking at the nature of the offense and the harm that the person may cause,” he said.

Over
more than three months that a visitor observed his courtroom, Judge
Dawson detained juveniles who had cut off electronic monitoring
bracelets, had been “out of control” at home, had smoked marijuana while
on probation, had failed to complete community service hours in a
timely fashion or had missed repeated court hearings. He rarely stated
in court the reason for the detentions.

Judge Dawson also often
set conditions for probation that even a well-behaved teenager might
have difficulty meeting, for example, ordering them to maintain a
specific grade average or, as in Tanika’s case, to remain on house
arrest for months in a row.

As delinquent acts go, Tanika’s
offense was a minor one. One day in the spring of 2013, she briefly
tangled with another girl outside a classroom.

The school fight
was so trivial that the Department of Juvenile Services initially
refused to pursue the complaint. No one was injured and Tanika had no
history of delinquency. (The New York Times agreed to withhold the last
names of the teenagers in this article because juvenile court records
are confidential.)

But when the other girl’s mother insisted —
her daughter’s hair weave had been ruined and she wanted $100 in
compensation — the department turned the complaint over to the
prosecutor, who filed a second-degree assault charge against Tanika.

When
the case came to court, the Juvenile Services Department recommended
that no action be taken. But when Tanika failed to show up for trial in
September 2013, a writ was issued for her arrest. At a hearing in
November, Judge Dawson detained her — Maryland law allows the detention
of children who pose a flight risk — and set a trial date for December:
Tanika was locked up for a month in the detention center.

She
ended up pleading guilty. Judge Dawson ordered her to pay restitution
and assigned 32 hours of community service. When, five months later, the
hours were not completed and she arrived late to court, he doubled the
hours and placed Tanika on house arrest, allowing her to leave home only
for school or the county work program.

Her second detention at
the Laurel center came after she visited a friend. The confinement, her
mother, Rachelle, said, “took her summer away.”

“It just took a lot away from her,” Rachelle said. “She couldn’t go to church because of the monitor on her leg.”

If house arrest was difficult, the detention center, the juvenile equivalent of an adult jail, was even worse.

“It was miserable,” Tanika said. “It’s a place you don’t want to be.”

At
first, Rachelle visited her daughter in detention — the two had never
been separated before. But she eventually decided to stay away, because,
she said, “when I did go, when I was leaving, she broke down crying
real bad.”

Pushing the Limits

Over the past year, the
Maryland public defender’s office became concerned that Judge Dawson was
testing the accepted limits of judicial discretion: In at least a dozen
cases, he had committed juveniles to locked facilities for specific
lengths of time — 18 months in one case, 12 months in several others.

The
commitments, the public defender’s office believed, were the equivalent
of adult sentences and violated the spirit of Maryland juvenile law,
which sets rehabilitation rather than punishment as the goal.

“I’ve
practiced all over the state, and I’m aware of no other judge in the
state of Maryland who issues these types of dispositions, not a one,”
said Stephen Bergman, a supervising attorney in the state public
defender’s juvenile protection division. “I think it’s clearly illegal.”

The
public defender’s office was not the only agency unhappy about the
commitment orders. The state Juvenile Services Department worried that
the orders put strain on institutions that had limited bed space and
were not set up to hold offenders for longer than the time it took to
complete the six- to nine-month programs they offered.

Besides,
said Eric Solomon, a spokesman for the department, it was in youths’
best interest to move them out of facilities once treatment goals had
been met.

Mr. Bergman had unsuccessfully tried to get another
Circuit Court judge in Prince George’s County to strike the language
setting specific terms from Judge Dawson’s orders, and the public
defender’s office was filing appeals. But the juveniles had remained
locked up, in some cases long after the Juvenile Services Department
recommended their release.

One of them, Jhenifer, a slight,
dark-eyed girl with a sudden, effervescent smile, had become a personal
mission for Mr. Bergman, who saw her as special — bright and motivated,
her potential stymied by the juvenile system and Judge Dawson’s tough
policies.

Jhenifer’s parents moved to the United States from
Brazil when she was 3, finding an affordable house in Laurel where they
could raise their two daughters. But the area was thick with drug
dealing and gang activities, and Jhenifer found trouble hard to avoid.

At
13, she was sexually assaulted by a much older man while at a house in
the neighborhood, an attack she told no one about for several years. She
lost friends to shootings and to suicide. Filled with anger and surging
with nervous energy, she began drinking and smoking marijuana.
Sometimes, she would leave home for days at a time.

In 2011,
Jhenifer, then 15, was standing on the street with friends, heavily
intoxicated, when the police stopped to question the group. She tried to
run but the officers tackled her, spraying Mace in her eye and leaving
her badly bruised, she said.

In most states, juveniles are not
entitled to jury trials. And when Jhenifer came to court, she pleaded
guilty to a charge of resisting arrest. Judge Dawson’s order sent her to
a residential treatment program in Ohio.

But when she emerged a
year later she was, if anything, hardened by time spent in a tightly
restricted setting, among girls who were as troubled — or in many cases,
more troubled — than she was.

Returning to the same neighborhood
and the same school, Jhenifer took up the same routines. And over
Christmas in 2012, she was arrested and charged with involvement in a
burglary and two robberies, along with a group of other teenagers and at
least one adult. One of the robberies involved a BB gun.

No one
was injured in the crimes, which netted a jacket and a small amount of
cash. But Jhenifer pleaded guilty to an adult charge of armed robbery
that was transferred to juvenile court.

For the next 10 months,
she sat at a detention center, waiting for placement in a locked
residential program. When, last December, she finally came before Judge
Dawson for disposition of the case, he was not in a forgiving mood. In
open court, with Jhenifer and her lawyer present, he committed her to a
secure facility. Later, in his written order, he specified that she must
be confined for “at least 18 months.”

But when Jhenifer
completed the center’s six-to-nine-month program at the 14-bed J.
DeWeese Carter Center in Chestertown — the state’s only secure
residential lockup for girls — in only five months, and received higher
scores for good behavior than any other girl there, the order began to
seem more like a punishment than the rehabilitation called for by
Maryland law.

In April, the Juvenile Services Department sent her
back to court with a recommendation that she be released. She had shown
great improvement at the center, the staff there said, and they thought
she should go to college. She was helpful, cooking meals for other
girls and keeping her room pin-neat. And she had goals: She wanted to be
a medical examiner like Dr. Jan Garavaglia of the television show “Dr.
G.”

But when Jhenifer arrived in court, Judge Dawson refused to hear the case, saying that she had been brought there in error.

“He
was actually upset because I was in his courtroom,” Jhenifer, now 19,
said in an interview. “He didn’t look at me, he didn’t speak to me, he
didn’t give my parents time to speak.”

When Jhenifer’s case
manager asked that she be given a home pass so that she could at least
visit her family, Judge Dawson denied the request.

For another
five months, Jhenifer remained at the center, locked in her room each
night and confined during the day within the fenced grounds.

But
in late September, as the legal challenges to his commitment orders were
under review by the state’s Court of Special Appeals, Judge Dawson
allowed a hearing on the case to go forward.

“I have some serious
questions about whether you’ve been rehabilitated,” Judge Dawson told
Jhenifer, as she stood next to Mr. Bergman at the defense table.

In
the end, though, he agreed to let her return home — her parents had
moved to another county to escape the bad influences on Jhenifer’s
younger sister — assigning her 250 hours of community service that she
recently completed.

“You’ve gotten a number of breaks, young lady,” he told her. “Sooner or later, your breaks are going to run out.”

‘I Am What I Am’

One
day, when Judge Dawson was a law student at Howard University in the
late 1970s, he saw a group of juvenile offenders being taken out of a
van near the courthouse. The youths were chained together.

“It
reminded me so much of slavery,” he said. “I decided I’d do whatever I
can do to work with the kids and get them into a better setting.”

If
on the bench Judge Dawson is often severe, he can also show warmth and
leniency. He asked for a round of applause for a girl who had done well
at school. And he praised a boy who came to court in a suit.

Judge
Dawson met his father only once, when he was 5, and even then did not
know it, only later learning the identity of the man who had bought him a
candy bar at a country store.

So he worries, he said, about the
many young offenders whose fathers are absent or in prison, and about
parents who do not seem to care about their children’s educations.

“I can’t raise 1,700 kids a year,” he is fond of remarking.

Yet lately, Judge Dawson has had to confront the limits on his ability to direct and control young offenders’ lives.

In
early October, the Maryland Court of Appeals ordered him to reconsider
the set-term commitments he had ordered, noting that a previous appeals
court ruling had found such dispositions unlawful. He has since either
released the youths or revised the language of the orders to comply with
the law.

And this fall, the Casey Foundation, taking note of the high detention rates, expanded its Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative to Prince George’s County. Mark Soler, executive director of the Center for Children’s Law and Policy
in Washington, is leading the effort, which offers training and
technical assistance to help jurisdictions reduce overreliance on locked
detention and develop other ways of holding juveniles accountable. Mr.
Soler and his staff have prepared an assessment of the county’s juvenile
system, based on interviews with all parties, including Judge Dawson.

“We
want judges to understand that the juvenile system is not the solution
to all the problems of children and families,” Mr. Soler said.

Among
other things, the initiative encourages the use of standardized
measures that rate how likely a juvenile is to flee or commit another
offense — measures that Mr. Soler said neither Judge Dawson nor
prosecutors had relied on in making decisions, although they can help
avoid locking up juveniles unnecessarily. Yet it is far from clear
whether Judge Dawson will join the ranks of the judges who have moved
away from routinely locking up young offenders.

Like most judges,
he is not immune to community pressure: He said he receives letters and
phone calls from crime victims and parents who urge him to be harder on
young offenders.

After the appeals court issued its order in
October, he began committing youths to locked settings but specifying
that they could not be sent to the secure facilities available in
Maryland, meaning they would go out of state and probably be
incarcerated for longer. But he has now reversed most of those orders as
well, he said, after public defenders and the Juvenile Services
Department objected to them.

Asked if he believes some juveniles
should be locked up for longer stretches, Judge Dawson said that for
serious offenses like armed robbery and carjacking, they should.

“I’m
not in good conscience, no matter what they say about me, going to put
that child back in the community,” he said. At least one of the
juveniles involved in the appeals court cases violated probation within a
week of being released, he said.

“I am what I am,” Judge Dawson
said. “If I don’t tell these kids to get out and get an education, for
the most part, they are not getting it, and nobody seems to care.”